Similar to standard email marketing software vendors, marketing automation software vendors have created workflow templates that help guide you through the automation process. This way, you don't have to build new sequences from scratch. These templates usually start with a basic interaction, such as a "Welcome" or a "Thank you for making a purchase" message. Once a contact receives the initial email, he or she is guided through a sequence based on his or her actions. For example, if John receives a welcome message and he clicks a link to an offer, then that action automatically pulls him onto a distinct email marketing journey. Conversely, if Sally deletes her welcome message, then she may automatically be pulled off the workflow to conserve your email output.

Contact-focused CRMs are one of the best ways to maintain a personal touch with your customers and business contacts, since you'll have one place to keep track of everything about them. Hatchbuck gives you that same contact-focused interface combined with even more detail about each person related to your company. It has a bit more focus on the traditional ways you'd gather leads—especially via forms—than the other apps listed here, and instead of focusing on every possible visitor it's just focused on the important leads you import or that fill out your forms.

Aritic PinPoint, a fully integrated permission-based marketing automation platform, is more popular for its advanced automation and customer engagement features. It enables businesses to nurture anonymous and identified visitors based on their browsing activities. Following this, features like ad targeting and behavior tracking help to fill in the sales-marketing pipeline. Dynamic segmentation, multichannel marketing, advanced filters and tags, progressive profiling, SEO and analytics, and a huge list of integrations have helped Aritic PinPoint make a strong digital foothold despite strong competition.
Through integration, you can have a unified approach to data management as all the contact, communication and other informational data is saved under one single platform. The data is organized, easy to view and edit, and faster to analyze. Also, a centralized data system means that new data is easy to input and organize, and tracking and reporting of data becomes efficient.
Marketing Automation Users: Marketing automation systems, as you would assume, are primarily used by the marketing department. Marketers can use the system to draw leads into the sales funnel, where they would then be transferred to the CRM system. The ability to respond to opportunities based on marketing initiatives gives your company a leg up on the competition and allows them to feed your sales funnel with qualified leads.
What you’ll learn is that abuse reports are the norm rather than the exception—it’s normal to have 1 for every few thousand emails that you send. Some consumers are sensitive to email marketing (due to years and years of abuse), and others aren’t always familiar with the opt-out process. It’s a genuine mistake — people sometimes confuse “abuse reports” with opt-out forms.
A marketing automation app will take a bit more time to set up than the traditional CRM. You'll likely need to copy a bit of code from the tool after you've created your account, and embed it into your site or app. Once you've done that, though, the apps here will do the rest of the work for you, identifying your visitors and clients and automating most of the CRM heavy lifting you'd have to do in other apps.
Incentives can help you zight these external forces. Let’s go back to that example where you were shopping online but left your credit card in the kitchen. If you had a one-night-only 30% off coupon, would you have been more inclined to get up and walk to the other side of the house? If your shopping cart purchase was $20? Probably not. But if you were planning to spend $100 or more, the answer is likely to be a clear ‘you bet.’
We currently have three Editors' Choice picks for marketing automation solutions here at PCMag. One of them, Campaigner, impressed us with its intuitive UI and its wealth of online resources. Another Editors' Choice, the aforementioned Pardot, excelled due to its built-in search and social marketing functionality. Lastly, the aforementioned HubSpot had an impressive set of prebuilt workflows that also got our top nod. While all of these are fantastic solutions, they are all quite different, and it's definitely worth taking the time to research the best solution for your needs. This, of course, also applies even to the other products that did not get an Editors' Choice designation.
Through integration, you can have a unified approach to data management as all the contact, communication and other informational data is saved under one single platform. The data is organized, easy to view and edit, and faster to analyze. Also, a centralized data system means that new data is easy to input and organize, and tracking and reporting of data becomes efficient.
These are just some of the amazing features you'll find when using marketing automation software. As a result, it's important for you to determine your most needed features before making a purchase decision. None of the tools we tested are bad. In fact, each of them will provide you with more power than your standard email marketing platform will. However, some are better than others, some are more expensive, and some do a better job letting you customize your workflows to suit your specific needs.
Email marketing is a great first step toward developing solid communications with your customers and prospects. But once you have moved past one-off messages and have decided to create prolonged, personalized messages powered by customer data, it's time to try marketing automation. No tools better exemplify the simplicity, effectiveness, and scalability of marketing automation software than two of our three Editors' Choice tools: HubSpot and Pardot.
Optimize your customer lifecycle from initial engagement to retention and loyalty with automated outreach in each step. Let Act! Marketing Automation do the work for you with response-driven nurture marketing campaigns—all sent to targeted lists in Act! automatically. Campaigns are triggered based on criteria you define, leading recipients down a highly personalized path.

We currently have three Editors' Choice picks for marketing automation solutions here at PCMag. One of them, Campaigner, impressed us with its intuitive UI and its wealth of online resources. Another Editors' Choice, the aforementioned Pardot, excelled due to its built-in search and social marketing functionality. Lastly, the aforementioned HubSpot had an impressive set of prebuilt workflows that also got our top nod. While all of these are fantastic solutions, they are all quite different, and it's definitely worth taking the time to research the best solution for your needs. This, of course, also applies even to the other products that did not get an Editors' Choice designation.

Established Enterprise software providers at the big end of town including IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe and Teradata started building their own platforms. But to accelerate their evolution they started acquiring technology start-ups that added features and market share. Salesforce bought Exact Target, IBM purchased SilverPop and Oracle bought Eloqua.

Marketing Automation Users: Marketing automation systems, as you would assume, are primarily used by the marketing department. Marketers can use the system to draw leads into the sales funnel, where they would then be transferred to the CRM system. The ability to respond to opportunities based on marketing initiatives gives your company a leg up on the competition and allows them to feed your sales funnel with qualified leads.

Market Segmentation: Based on tracking information, the system can automatically assign the lead to a marketing segment. It then interacts with people in that segment using very personalized communication. The system can also track results of the interaction to produce analytics that rate the success of the process and how likely individual leads would be to convert into customers.

A CRM is a software solution used by sales and service teams to cultivate deeper relationships with interested buyers and active customers. Used to house prospect and client data, the CRM system has a collection of information for each contact in your organization, information your teams can then leverage in their client meetings and communications.

Instead of being a separate app with just a code snippet you'll add to your site, Inbound Now lives inside your WordPress install, capturing leads and automating marketing right from the place you manage the rest of your site. It's got free tools to create landing pages, A/B test them, and identify your site visitors, then there's paid extensions that'll add social media and email integration, lead importing, and more.

Inbound Lead Generation: Modern SMB automation tools for marketing empower you to generate quality leads through inbound content marketing tactics. You can make your blogs or websites more interactive and create personalized landing pages with utmost ease. Customized web forms can help you implement progressive profiling that provides a non-intrusive way to capture lead or customer data in a seamless manner.

The next part of the process is triggered once the sales team takes over, continues engaging with the leads, and vets for their level of interest as well as capability to purchase. When leads have been assessed as viable prospects, they now become SQLs. In this specific journey from MQL to SQL as well as the overall process that cover the stages from lead to customer, the features and capabilities of marketing automation and CRM come into play.

There's also the marketing broadcast tools you'd expect to email all of your contacts, but there's also ways to send voice messages, faxes, or even print out paper letters with your contacts' personalized info to send out by mail. And if you're not already selling products directly from your site, you can use Infusionsoft's eCommerce tools to build your own store and track the purchases and pages viewed right in your CRM. It's everything you'd need to identify your customers' needs, customize marketing to them, actually sell your real products, and make sure you're staying on top of everything you need to do at the same time.
There are plenty of businesses that rely on close personal relationships, where that have a hand-picked set of leads that their sales team works to turn into deals. They need to track what's said, note personal details about the contact, and make sure they know when they need to follow up. That's where the dozens of great traditional CRM apps come in, as we looked at in chapter 2. They're tools that can help your business track all of the info about your customers, your conversations with them, and convert them from leads into deals.
Incentives can help you zight these external forces. Let’s go back to that example where you were shopping online but left your credit card in the kitchen. If you had a one-night-only 30% off coupon, would you have been more inclined to get up and walk to the other side of the house? If your shopping cart purchase was $20? Probably not. But if you were planning to spend $100 or more, the answer is likely to be a clear ‘you bet.’

A marketing automation app will take a bit more time to set up than the traditional CRM. You'll likely need to copy a bit of code from the tool after you've created your account, and embed it into your site or app. Once you've done that, though, the apps here will do the rest of the work for you, identifying your visitors and clients and automating most of the CRM heavy lifting you'd have to do in other apps.

Uses tracking codes in social media, email and webpages to track the behavior of anyone interested in a product or service to gain a measure of intent. It can record which social media group or thread they followed, which link was clicked on in an email or which search term was used to access a website. Multiple link analysis can then track buyer behavior - following links and multiple threads related to product A but not B will show an interest only in A. This allows more accurately targeted response and the development of a nurturing program specifically targeted towards their interest and vertical market. Due to its interactive nature this has been described as Marketing Automation 2.0.
For home security company Blink, success began with a 2014 Kickstarter campaign. More than 7,000 backers provided them with funding, and these backers became an engaged audience. After that, Blink used Mailchimp's powerful testing and reporting tools in combination with surveys to determine what these customers liked best. They learned that design matters just as much as content and that it's as valuable to send relationship-building emails as it is to send emails that convert. In this article, Blink tells us how optimizing their email automations has helped them sell more than 400,000 of their security products.
There's also live chat, an extra that's a nice way to let people reach out to you when they're stuck. You can talk to people on your site directly from Interakt, leading them through your app or helping them see exactly which of your products is best for them. Combine that with in-app messages and email campaigns, and you have everything you need to lead your users through the sales process.

Marketing has evolved significantly over the years and has become more complex and perplexing than ever. Consumers are now using multiple media platforms to gather data and stay up-to-date, making life difficult for marketers. However, with marketing automation in CRM, a business can streamline and optimize a variety of marketing tasks. This will increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the sales and marketing team by saving time on administrative tasks, delivering messages with the right content to the right audience, closing deals faster through increased automation and increasing revenue and profits.

If you run a small business, you probably wear a lot of different hats. Often there's little time to think about drawing traffic to your site, growing your following, or selling your stuff—even if it is vital to your success. Marketing automation is software that handles these tasks for you. Instead of creating a one-off campaign every time you need to talk to your customers—via emails or your social media channels—you can set up automations, and never have to worry about customers slipping through the cracks. Learn the basics of marketing automation. Learn the basics of marketing automation.

Marketing automation platforms are used by marketers while CRM programs are utilized by sales people. Both offer automation, analytics and reporting features to streamline daily tasks and provide users with important metrics and insights on the progress, efficiency and effectiveness of marketing campaigns as well as sales activities and efforts. As said earlier, they may handle the same customer information but employ it for different activities and operations.

As of 25th May 2018 the General Data Protection Regulation came into effect, [4] this has had a large impact on the way marketing teams and organisations can manage their consumer data. Any organisation using marketing automation tracking is required to ask consent of from the consumer as well as provide transparency on how the data will be processed.
If you run a small business, you probably wear a lot of different hats. Often there's little time to think about drawing traffic to your site, growing your following, or selling your stuff—even if it is vital to your success. Marketing automation is software that handles these tasks for you. Instead of creating a one-off campaign every time you need to talk to your customers—via emails or your social media channels—you can set up automations, and never have to worry about customers slipping through the cracks. Learn the basics of marketing automation. Learn the basics of marketing automation.
The latest version of IBM Campaign brings many innovations to the sophisticated marketing team enabling you to work smarter and faster, and to keep your customers more engaged and loyal than ever. Marketers use IBM Campaign to maximize revenue and responses via personalized and optimized campaigns and offers. Increase results with powerful segmentation against the largest data sources and provide the right offers to the right contacts at the right time in the right channel. Boost ROI by optimizing contact communications and marketing spend. Choose to deploy fully to the cloud or on premise. Improve engagement and ROI: Easily integrate with the rest of your marketing ecosystem to seamlessly execute personalized, offline and digital campaigns to take your customers on targeted journeys. Work smarter and faster: With AI-powered Watson Assistant available with IBM Campaign, work smarter and drive to insights more quickly than ever. Save time, make better decisions and drive customer engagement. Optimize ownership for your enterprise: Choose the deployment and ownership approach that works best for your organization. Deploy on premise or via subscription and fully to the cloud — managed and hosted.
If your company has a small, in-house marketing team, don’t let resource constraints prohibit you from getting the most out of your marketing efforts. Marketing automation is great for growing your contact base and managing email campaigns. Comprehensive reporting and analytics help you improve the effectiveness of all your marketing campaigns, meaning more opens, clicks, shares, etc. Some platforms have flexible and affordable pricing models to help companies with restrictive budgets grow at their own pace. Also, if the platform is too much to handle in house, don’t worry – there are many marketing agencies that specialize in automation that can help you maximize your return. Make sure you choose a platform that agencies embrace, so you can get assistance beyond the vendor’s own onboarding program and have an ongoing resource to guide you through campaigns.
On the lower end of the pricing spectrum, you'll find products such as Infusionsoft, which costs $379 per month for five users, 50,000 contacts, and unlimited emails per month. The Complete package also includes Infusionsoft's four core feature sets (CRM, e-commerce, marketing automation, and sales automation) at no extra charge. SendinBlue and Zoho Campaigns both offer free plans for anyone who is unwilling to spend even a dime for marketing workflows. Both tools scale upward for added capacity and complexity, and each offers pay-as-you-go plans for companies just dipping their toes into email marketing and marketing automation.

If you run a small business, you probably wear a lot of different hats. Often there's little time to think about drawing traffic to your site, growing your following, or selling your stuff—even if it is vital to your success. Marketing automation is software that handles these tasks for you. Instead of creating a one-off campaign every time you need to talk to your customers—via emails or your social media channels—you can set up automations, and never have to worry about customers slipping through the cracks. Learn the basics of marketing automation. Learn the basics of marketing automation.

For true Greenfield installations, however, it is actually best to have the CRM system perform the marketing automation functions. While buying best of breed for each system has advantages, if a feature really is valuable the CRM vendor will eventually implement it. So in the medium to long term, the costs of integration and database synchronization for separate best of breed systems is typically more trouble than it’s worth.

Are you frustrated that you don't have enough control over your website and marketing? Foster Web Marketing has built the solution for you and it is called DSS (Dynamic Self-Syndication). DSS is inbound marketing software with CMS/CRM capabilities that allows you to take control of your marketing and get your business to the next level. DSS has everything you need to manage your marketing easily and effectively. Manage your website, clients, email marketing, client feedback, reviews, social media posting, lead tracking and follow-up campaigns in one easy to use tool! Stop taping solutions together and use one smarter tool. One of the most compelling features of DSS is the built-in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which gives you the power to manage your leads and contacts, build follow-up campaigns and email marketing blasts, and create and send email newsletters. No need to pay for separate tools or software! This is why DSS is not just a CMS like WordPress, but actually, a fully operational marketing software that will put you light years ahead of your competition!

Adestra is a leading global provider of First-Person Marketing email and lifecycle marketing solutions for global and growing brands alike. The company's industry leading email marketing and automation platform provides marketers with a powerful infrastructure that helps them communicate more effectively with their customers and subscribers by providing hyper-relevant context. This proprietary technology also allows for automated email messaging and incorporates enterprise-class native functionality, which reduces implementations. Along with a superior platform to execute marketing automation, Adestra was founded on the principle that marketing success takes more than technology, which is why customer service is at the heart of our business. Adestra is more than software as a service. Adestra is Software AND a Service®.

Iterable is the growth marketing platform that enables brands to create, execute and optimize campaigns to power world-class customer engagement across email, push, SMS, in-app and more with unparalleled data flexibility. An integrated, cross-channel solution—built for marketers, trusted by engineers, designed with intelligence. Lifecycle Marketing Made Simple Engage your customers at each touchpoint of their buying journey—from sign-up to check-out and beyond. Drive user activation, nurture, and reactivation with relevant cross-channel messaging. Warmer Welcomes Activate consumer attention and interest with stand-out content that makes an impactful first impression. Get new customers acquainted with your products and services with personalized welcome, trial and onboarding campaigns. Next-Gen Nurture Captivate customers to build rapport for the long term and strengthen their relationship with your brand. Stay top-of-mind with targeted sales, promotions, announcements and product updates across all the channels that matter most to your audience. Robust Re-Engagement Keep customers coming back for more by reactivating their interest to drive retention and loyalty. Deploy cart abandonment campaigns to complete more checkouts, then trigger post-purchase or renewal sequences when the time is right.
There's also live chat, an extra that's a nice way to let people reach out to you when they're stuck. You can talk to people on your site directly from Interakt, leading them through your app or helping them see exactly which of your products is best for them. Combine that with in-app messages and email campaigns, and you have everything you need to lead your users through the sales process.
Great post and clarification. Personally I use http://www.myconversionbrain.com as it’s cheap and designed for small business owners like myself. It’s not so much of a crm but more of a marketing automation tool and lead tracking which helps my marketing efforts. The problem I find with most marketing automation systems is that its way too expensive for small business owners.
Not even close. Like the term suggests, marketing automation encompasses marketing campaigns across all channels—from direct mail and phone campaigns to online, social and mobile initiatives. What’s more, it combines robust, insight-focused capabilities from your CRM, lead management system, web analytics platform, and other systems to create something that’s more than the sum of the parts.
Marketing automation platforms are used by marketers while CRM programs are utilized by sales people. Both offer automation, analytics and reporting features to streamline daily tasks and provide users with important metrics and insights on the progress, efficiency and effectiveness of marketing campaigns as well as sales activities and efforts. As said earlier, they may handle the same customer information but employ it for different activities and operations.
The emfluence Marketing Platform was built for marketers, by marketers. We believe that usability is as important as functionality. That’s why we’ve focused the emfluence Marketing Platform’s features around what’s really important: helping digital marketers like you accomplish your goals every day. Whether you’re launching your own digital campaigns, managing a brand across a network of franchises, or creating campaigns for your book of business, you can leverage the emfluence Marketing Platform for: • Email Automation • Email Marketing • Drag & Drop Email Builders • Social Media Management • Surveys • Landing Pages • Form Builders • Automated Reporting • Website Tracking • Light Boxes and Modals • Variable Content Blocks Why do we spend so much time focusing on how you use our platform? Because we’re marketers, too, and we know that digital marketing isn’t just about sending emails and posting pictures to your favorite social media channel. It’s complex recipe of strategy, timing, response, and engagement. We believe with the right tool, you’ll be unstoppable.
Marketing automation focuses on the needs of the marketing team and CRM is focused on the needs of the sales team, Hendrix said. “Marketing automation is your communication engine, while CRM is your database of record,” she added. Some marketing automation systems support native integrations for CRMs like Salesforce, SugarCRM and Microsoft Dynamics. These integrations help marketers create a connected and automated lead management process that enables optimization over time, with the right reporting.
Personalization. Without personalized messaging, you’ll miss out on a significant number of conversions. Leverage marketing automation’s tracking capabilities to tailor your conversations with your contacts. Personalization works: 88% of U.S. marketers reported seeing measurable improvements due to personalization — with more than half reporting a lift greater than 10%.
Personalization As you build out your inbound marketing and marketing automation strategy, you will learn more about your leads. This learning process will empower your company to re-invest that data into refining your marketing strategy. Marketing automation software will help you streamline this process and build 1:1 connections with hundreds of thousands—and even millions—of users.
Marketing Automation Users: Marketing automation systems, as you would assume, are primarily used by the marketing department. Marketers can use the system to draw leads into the sales funnel, where they would then be transferred to the CRM system. The ability to respond to opportunities based on marketing initiatives gives your company a leg up on the competition and allows them to feed your sales funnel with qualified leads.
At its best, marketing automation is software and tactics that allow companies to buy and sell like Amazon -- that is, to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into delighted customers. This type of marketing automation typically generates significant new revenue for companies, and provides an excellent return on the investment required.
Autopilot is simple and visual customer journey software. We help you capture and convert new leads, connect with customers, and create loyal repeat buyers. LAUNCH IN MINUTES Autopilot’s visual canvas for creating customers journeys is inspired by drawing campaigns on a whiteboard. Whether you need to follow up with new contacts, qualify and assign leads to sales, or onboard customers, you can automate your marketing simply by dragging and connecting shapes together in just a few minutes. INTEGRATE POPULAR TOOLS Connect Autopilot with tools like Salesforce, Facebook, Segment, Slack, Typeform, Twilio, and Zapier. Or plug in your own using our API. By centralizing your data, you can create a personalized experience based on interests and behavior. Instantly trigger automated journeys to assign leads in Salesforce, follow up after LiveChat conversations, or add customers to a Facebook Custom Audience. CREATE MULTI-CHANNEL EXPERIENCES Create a better experience for you customers by sending targeted emails, in-app messages, SMS, and postcards at the right time in their journey. Allow subscribers to opt-in by texting a keyword to a number. Notify active customers of a new product feature when they log in to your app. Celebrate milestones or offer a special discount by sending a postcard as easily as automating an email. TRACK AND OPTIMIZE PERFORMANCE Set a goal for every journey to get insight into which messages convert and how journeys are trending. Track your performance in real-time, run A/B test experiments, and quickly optimize based on results. Autopilot has helped the Equality Campaign in Australia win the YES vote on gay marriage. It’s helped Microsoft communicate with and onboard new developers. It’s helped Patreon connect and educate creators to give them new revenue streams. And it’s helped hundreds of startups tell their story and grow their businesses. Are you ready to launch your next customer journey? We offer a 30-day free trial so you can try it out, no credit card required.

There are plenty of businesses that rely on close personal relationships, where that have a hand-picked set of leads that their sales team works to turn into deals. They need to track what's said, note personal details about the contact, and make sure they know when they need to follow up. That's where the dozens of great traditional CRM apps come in, as we looked at in chapter 2. They're tools that can help your business track all of the info about your customers, your conversations with them, and convert them from leads into deals.

It's far less of a CRM and a marketing automation app than most of the apps on here, but it fills an important niche for businesses with more calls than clicks. You can take your sales calls in the web app, track info about each of the callers, and CallTrackingMetrics will let you know which page or ad the user saw when they called. There's even SMS automation so you can send text messages to potential customers, following up even when there's not an app for them to keep using.

Mailchimp’s marketing automation gives you the ability to create a single email—or an email series—that sends automatically based on predetermined triggers. We evaluated data from 150,000 businesses that use Mailchimp to compare single and multiple-email automations and to learn which yields better results. Our findings showed that if your goal is to sell more stuff, opting for an automation series can help increase impressions and result in more sales. But there are interesting outliers. Use our findings and test a single email against a full series for each automation to learn which one resonates with your customers and works best for your business.

Automating your customer discovery can be scary, and a big commitment. If that's how you're feeling, Intercom might be the perfect choice since it lets you try it out for free and still gathers your real customer data. Then, if that gets you itching for more, it's just an upgrade away. Plus, since you can take care of support in the same app, you'll have your CRM, marketing, and support all under one roof, giving you the communication tools you need to actually make a difference with your users.
Want one app to handle every part of your marketing in one place? GreenRope has enough features to do just that. It's a marketing automation tool that can send drip emails or SMS messages, with automation workflows to send messages after contacts visit specific pages or reply to GreenRope's built-in surveys and courses that you can customize for your own marketing.
Agile CRM is really great software for marketers who want to leverage MA system for business. Agile gives a perfect system that helps you to track user activity and trigger automation in a very simplified manner. The usability of the product is really excellent once you're familiar with it. Agile give you very clean details including, web history, location, IP etc which helps you to segment and track user behaviour in advance manner.
Marketing’s core objective is to feed the pipeline for sales. At the end of the day, the sales team is marketing’s number one client. Marketing’s role in the lead nurturing process has grown over the last decade to align with the lengthening sales prospecting process. Most B2B purchases—especially technology purchases—span multiple departments, which means there are multiple stakeholders involved in any buying decision. According to CEB, 5.4 people now have to formally sign off on each purchase, this is 40% larger than it was 2 years ago.
Bpm’online has been named a Challenger in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation, 2018, 2017, 2016 and the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management, 2017, 2016; recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, included into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites, 2017 and Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High-Productivity Application Platform as a Service, 2018.

Automating your customer discovery can be scary, and a big commitment. If that's how you're feeling, Intercom might be the perfect choice since it lets you try it out for free and still gathers your real customer data. Then, if that gets you itching for more, it's just an upgrade away. Plus, since you can take care of support in the same app, you'll have your CRM, marketing, and support all under one roof, giving you the communication tools you need to actually make a difference with your users.

Marketing automation is a type of software that allows companies to effectively target customers with automated marketing messages across channels including email, websites, social media and text messages to generate sales leads. The technology is a segment of customer relationship management, or CRM, and is typically used by marketing departments as a way to remove repetitive tasks from staff workflows and increase overall marketing efficiency.

Uses tracking codes in social media, email and webpages to track the behavior of anyone interested in a product or service to gain a measure of intent. It can record which social media group or thread they followed, which link was clicked on in an email or which search term was used to access a website. Multiple link analysis can then track buyer behavior - following links and multiple threads related to product A but not B will show an interest only in A. This allows more accurately targeted response and the development of a nurturing program specifically targeted towards their interest and vertical market. Due to its interactive nature this has been described as Marketing Automation 2.0.

We currently have three Editors' Choice picks for marketing automation solutions here at PCMag. One of them, Campaigner, impressed us with its intuitive UI and its wealth of online resources. Another Editors' Choice, the aforementioned Pardot, excelled due to its built-in search and social marketing functionality. Lastly, the aforementioned HubSpot had an impressive set of prebuilt workflows that also got our top nod. While all of these are fantastic solutions, they are all quite different, and it's definitely worth taking the time to research the best solution for your needs. This, of course, also applies even to the other products that did not get an Editors' Choice designation.